ARCHEOLOGY AND ECOLOGY OF ALASKA — SOLECKI 479 



ever, until recently no one had found similar evidence of man's antiq- 

 uity in Alaska, which is the area through which man would have passed 

 into the interior of the continent. 



The first important writing on the subject of pre-Neolithic or rela- 

 tively old horizons in Alaska was briefly sketched by N. C. Nelson 

 ( 1937) . In a paper describing some curious flints found on the Uni- 

 versity of Alaska campus near Fairbanks, Alaska, he compared the 

 flints with similarly unique specimens recovered by him in the Gobi 

 Desert of Mongolia. These artifacts consist of highly specialized 

 examples of the flint-working art, including "fluted" flint cores, poly- 

 hedral and semipolyhedral in shape, and their derived flakes. These 

 flakes, comparatively long and narrow with parallel sides, are called 

 lamellar flakes because of their shape. Significantly enough, identi- 

 cally shaped cores and flakes have been found and noted subsequently 

 at other places in Alaska and include the writer's finds on the north 

 slope (pi. 3). 



Although Nelson did not suggest any direct connection, these flints 

 and associated artifacts reminded him strongly of the corresponding 

 artifacts typical of the pre-Neolithic (or Mesolithic) times in Mon- 

 golia (Rainey, 1940, p. 302). Equating Mesolithic with an age of 

 about 8,000 years, we assume that these artifacts represent a culture 

 in Alaska that must have been in existence between the time of the 

 older Folsom-point bearers and the more recent prehistoric Eskimo. 

 There seems to be evidence that this lithic material is also of pre- 

 Athapascan Indian age in Alaska (Skarland and Gicldings, 1948, p. 

 116). Collins (1943, p. 233) says that "the earliest known stages of 

 Eskimo culture are hardly more than 2,000 years old." An interest- 

 ing problem of cultural connection is posed between the immediate 

 ancestors of the Eskimos, who may have lived near Lake Baikal 

 (Collins, 1943, p. 232), and the polyhedral-core and lamellar-flake 

 people, who had evidently also lived in the vicinity of that same part 

 of Siberia (Rainey, 1940, pp. 302-304). These two cultures seem to 

 have been contemporaneous there. 



It was early suggested that one of the migration routes of Early 

 Man was probably over the unglaciated northern slope of Alaska, 

 fronting on the Arctic Ocean. This presented, then, one of the more 

 intriguing problem areas. Archeological investigations had been 

 limited heretofore to only the coastal fringe, which was reasonably 

 accessible (Larsen and Rainey, 1948, pp. 30-31). Some hints of 

 the archeological potentialities were recorded on the north slope by 

 Smith and Mertie (1930, pp. 110-112). These scattered finds, made 

 by geologists of the United States Geological Survey in the early 

 ]920's, did not seem to bespeak any antiquity, however. It was not 

 until World War II and immediately following that there were any 

 further archeological discoveries reported from the interior. A fbid 



